Biz & IT —

Sugar Labs gets sweet with the GNOME Foundation

Internal friction within the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project led to the departure of Walter Bender—the project's former president of software—earlier this year. He launched Sugar Labs, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving and encouraging adoption of the Sugar environment, an interactive software platform that was originally designed by OLPC to implement constructivist education philosophies.

The GNOME foundation announced today that Sugar Labs has become its latest member and that Bender will become an active participant in the GNOME advisory board. Sugar leverages many technologies from the GNOME stack, including the GTK+ widget toolkit and the Telepathy messaging framework. Large parts of the Sugar user interface were developed in the Python programming language with the GTK+ bindings. Sugar is packaged for several distributions, including Fedora and Ubuntu, and is distributed under the GNU's General Public License (GPL).

"Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability," said GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters in a statement. "The interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in the future."

In addition to some creative and experimental interaction concepts, the Sugar platform also offers some unique tools to introduce children to computer programming, such as an interactive Python learning environment called Pippy. Sugar has some potential value outside of the OLPC project and it could be a powerful tool in classrooms. Sugar Labs has also been informal talks with some hardware vendors, so it's possible that we could see Sugar preinstalled on some Linux-based netbooks in the future.

It seems like Sugar Labs is driving development forward in a more positive way now that the project has detached itself a bit from the baggage of OLPC's weak leadership and lack of direction. Closer collaboration between the GNOME and Sugar communities could give Sugar a bit of a boost and help it fulfill its potential.